Configuring the Documents and Media portlet

To configure the Documents and Media portlet, click on the gear icon at the top of the portlet window and select Configuration. The portlet-specific customizations appear on the Setup tab. To change your Documents and Media portlet’s top-level folder, click Select below Root Folder, browse or create the folder you’d like to be your new top-level folder, and click Save. The root folder is the highest-level folder that’s accessible from the Documents and Media portlet. For example, suppose you created a folder called My Documents in the Documents and Media portlet’s default Home folder. If you set the My Documents folder to be your portlet’s new root folder, the original Home folder would no longer be accessible.

Figure 5.6: To make portlet-specific configurations for Documents and Media, click on the gear icon at the top of the portlet window and select Configuration.

By default, the Documents and Media portlet contains a search bar to help users quickly find relevant files. If you’d like the search bar not to appear, uncheck the Show Search box. The Maximum Entries to Display dropdown menu lets you set a limit on how many folders and files can be displayed in the portlet window at once. By default, the Documents and Media portlet contains three display style views: Icon, List, and Descriptive. Icons for each appear in the portlet window, allowing users to select the display style with which they’re most comfortable. Under the Display Style Views heading, you can select which display styles users are able to choose and you can arrange the order of the selected display styles. The topmost display style in the list becomes the portlet’s default display style.

Related assets are enabled by default for Documents and Media files. Related assets allow users to link assets together even if the assets don’t share any tags or categories. To disable related assets for files in your Documents and Media portlet, uncheck the Enable Related Assets box. For more information on related assets, see the section on defining content relationships in chapter 6.

Under the Show Columns heading, you can customize which columns appear when your Documents and Media portlet uses the list display style. By default, file names, sizes, statuses, downloads, and actions are displayed. You can also configure the portlet to display files’ create dates and modified dates. To add or remove columns from being displayed, move them to the Current box or to the Available box. You can arrange the columns in the Current box to control the order in which the columns appear in the portlet: the topmost column in the box appears as the leftmost column in the portlet.

Ratings and comment ratings are also enabled by default for Documents and Media files. If users decide that a file or certain comment about a file is useful or informative, they can rate it as good by clicking on the thumbs up icon next to the rating. If they think the file or comment is unhelpful or misleading, they can click on the thumbs down icon. If you’d like to disable ratings or comment ratings for files, uncheck the Enable Ratings or Enable Comment Ratings box, respectively.